


Heaven is a red thing

by venus woman and giant saurian (grayglube)



Series: The Long Con [1]
Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: AU, Brother Gods, Dubious Consent, F/M, Kidnapping, Menstruation, Other, Snake Kink, Virgin Sacrifice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 07:10:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14869095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/venus%20woman%20and%20giant%20saurian
Summary: “You did so well, now I can stay. You were praying to me. I could feel it," he’d said, smiling against her ear, taking what was left to take.





	Heaven is a red thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [delirante](https://archiveofourown.org/users/delirante/gifts).



> This is dark fic, it's got kink and such dubious consent it might squick some of you.  
> also big thanks to delirante who helped me out with this and was the best cheerleader to my strange ideas

It’s not easy coming up for air. He’s not meant for the world above where his brother has built a separate kingdom.

 

But, it isn’t his brother that’s raised him up and it isn’t his brother that’s caught up with him this time. His arrival is like birth,  but his nature in such stark opposition to life leaves little guesswork what he asks for first; a sacrifice.

 

He hurts with a soul deep, venom-hunger all over and inside of his bones.

 

His new existence and form in the upper realm are his brother’s own creations, an identity with a life and a shadow of purpose; they’re swindlers and criminals running a long con against gods older than either of them and something’s called him out.

 

He brother grins beside the man who has helped raise him up.

 

Richard Gecko finds nothing impressive about either of them, or himself at first glance.

 

* * *

 

 

In Mexico there’s a man in a suit with a tattoo crawling up his neck who asks her about Jesus.

_What’s good with the good book, Sister Christian._

 

He’s mocking her but she breathes and moves past that, talks and talks and talks until she’s said all she can about God and his love and his children who are righteous on the Earth and he’s smiling, teeth one thousand watts of white and perfect.

 

He’s got a good smile, even if he’s not a good man.

 

The trunk of the car he puts her in smells like sweat, like someone else has been in it before her.

 

* * *

 

 

There’s another man, not a good man, not even pretending to be one like the other with the tattoo who pressed a gun barrel against her bottom spine and shut a trunk on her.

 

This one looks at her like she’s pornographic with a dirty leer and itchy hands.

 

“You believe in God don’t you?” the man asks her.

 

“Careful professor,” the other says.

 

“I do,” she answers.

 

The professor’s smile is too full of tell, a card deck joker. “Mine are real,” the man says, looking smug, looking at the man who has taken her and then towards the shut door behind her.

 

“Mine is all around,” she asserts.

 

The man waves away her words. “Whatever,” he says. “The guy I’m talking about is in the next room, I think he just ate a priest or something. He needs prayers to live too. Up here it’s hard, slim pickings, not enough worship to go around. But, you’re a real pure soul.” He grins again. “Aren’t you Katie?”

 

A crushed, empty water bottle  arcs out and hit the man in the forehead, he drops her I.D. onto the floor, her own face smiles up at her.

 

“Shut it, Tanner.”

 

“Fuck you too, Hanuhpu.”

 

She stares are her driver’s license, her birthdate and imagines what it will look like on her tombstone.

 

* * *

 

 

Seth smirks against the doorframe. “I got you something.”

 

Prostrate and paler than he should be his brother grouses to the bare mattress. “I don’t want any sour worms.”

 

Seth pulls open a pack and begins to eat colorful sour sugar ropes one by one, sucking his fingers. He holds up the bag. “These aren’t for you,” he says.

 

Richie rolls to his back, shaking his head. “Can’t eat any of that shit anymore anyway,” he complains.

 

“I got you something better. Take a look.”

 

The tablet bounces next to him with a  hollow sound, a clear camera feed shows their guest, pacing. He looks, stares, looks away and shuts his eyes. “I can catch dinner myself,” he tells his brother.

 

Seth scowls, recovering to smile again. “She’s more than dinner. She’s dessert and brunch the next day.”

 

“You brought me a girl? That’s thoughtful,” Richie rumbles, disinterested now that the primal fog has cleared, now that he’s settled into real skin again, now that he has a man’s name and a man’s shape.

 

“Found you a fucking unicorn.”

 

“I hate horses.”

 

Seth crouches down, upending sour sugar onto his brother’s mussed hair and collar, avoiding the handy retaliation that follows. “There’s a saying about that too,” he reminds his brother. “Gifts, looking them in the mouth. I brought you a virgin, the least you can say is ‘thank you, Seth’, try it,” he chastises sharply.

 

Richie sits up to push him away. “I’m going to have to eat her, not right that I should thank you.”

 

“And she should thank you for the opportunity,” his brother says.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s in her eighth day of captivity that she sees him; he wears a black suit and tie, the frames of his glasses are black like his shoes, like the circles under his eyes and the scabs on his knuckles.

 

“I heard you praying,” he says.

 

His shadow is black too, large enough to swallow hers as he comes close to her.

 

“I pray every day,” she tells him.

 

“Why?” he asks.

 

“You feel like someone’s listening, I guess, someone who cares.”

 

He doesn’t move further into the room but his shadow sways on the wall behind him.

 

“What do you want them to care about?” he asks her.

 

“I’m afraid.”

 

He cants his head to the side, staring for a few too many seconds of silence. “They won’t hurt you.”

 

“Are you going to hurt me?” she asks.

 

“No,” he grins, “You’re a nice girl, Kate.” He holds her purse up from behind him by its broken strap. She looks away from it.

 

“Why did you take me?”

 

“I didn’t take you. My brother did. He thinks I’m lonely.”

 

She tries to remember the shows she’s seen, shows her parents would watch, Dateline and 20-20, anything that they would make her and Scott leave the living room so that they could watch, not wanting their good Christian children to be scared, even though her brother watched pornography on his cell phone and she was reading racier manga in her bedroom.

 

“You’re lucky, I can barely get my brother to pick up laundry detergent.”

 

“You’re right,” he says. “I got a whole girl.”

 

She shivers unpleasantly.

 

The next time she wakes up it’s to the glowing face of Mary, a mother-of-god with a tan, nightlight to fill the room with shadows as large as his had been.  

 

* * *

 

 

They haven’t hurt her, not really, but it’s not the absence of physical pain alone that can make up for the taking of her in the first place.

 

There’s nothing anyone can do to make it better, she knows that.

 

She’s not an idiot.

 

She thinks about her parents and her brother and what they must be thinking, of where they’ve been looking for her.

 

She can imagine so clearly Scott saying something scathing about the Dateline special they’ll be busily creating for another suburban white girl lost in a foreign country and probably dead.

 

She doesn’t feel like eating and when she sleeps her dreams are all made strange by circumstance, the worry of what’s going to happen next.

 

* * *

 

 

He’s standing in the dark, away from the window.

 

For the first time, she’s outside of the room that was never even locked in the first place, if she even thought to check.

 

The nail polish on her toes has chipped and her dress is rumpled from sitting on the floor, languishing in her captivity.

 

She doesn’t look afraid, just hesitant, and curious, her heartbeat skipping but not yet running. She hasn’t said anything about wanting to go home, yet.

 

He doesn’t think she’s naive, but she does look honest.

 

And the honest ones always lie to themselves the most.

 

They lie about the odds, their own chances.

 

“You’re part of some kind of...religion, right?” she asks.

 

“Cult?” he corrects, tasting the word in the space between them.

 

She’s too smart to say something that could make a cultist snap. She doesn’t nod, she swallows.

 

He looks at the hollow of her throat, the stretch of it covered in dusted up dirt, her freckled skin stretched thin.

 

“You believe in something? And, that’s why you took me,” she risks.

 

“I didn’t take anyone.”

 

“Your brother,” she corrects.

 

“I’m not part of a cult. That’s not why you’re here Kate.”

 

She winces when he smiles at her.

 

The sasak ukib rolls over his shoulders and shifts down the line of his suit’s dusty sleeve. He’s tired from the heat and her heartbeat is some sluggish cadence of lullaby and achingly distracting temptation.

 

“Why _am_ I here?” she asks. Her bare feet make whispered tracks backwards on the floor, the shuffle of her calloused heels is a soft sususrrus. From the darker side of the room, in the dust and the dimness, his eyes are yellow and his face shifts into scales, like he’s shrugging off an ill-fitting jacket.

 

Humanity is a badly tailored three-piece on him now that he’s topside again. It’s been hard to be away from home.

 

Her heart beats so fast and her lungs fill so full that he can smell the awful burnt circuit singed scent of fear blooming off of her skin like someone’s shook out an old blanket. The snake moves down in an easy glide down to floor when he stands. His suit doesn’t catch fire but his shoes make the bright half-circle of sun in the window frame wink off of black beetle shine of them.

 

His fingers start to smoke as he crosses a patch of bright afternoon.

 

A half-mile away three boys kick a soccer ball, wooden kendama clack against each other on tangled strings, hot pepper and horchata sweet bleeds across his palette from a barrio away, someone sings something high and mournful in the distance that lies at the edges of his enhanced perception.

 

Four steps away Kate Fuller clutches her little gold cross between three fingers and steps back with her two bare feet catching on the rough wooden floor.

 

Her rumpled dress smells like the sun and her sweat and the dust of the safe house that’s stuck to the sheen of it on her skin. Her neon pink vasculature glows and her life blood pumps as heavily through her as he wants to.

 

When he moves it’s too fast for her to follow, too fast for her to see and when she’s on the floor her fingers keep tight to her mother’s cross. He unstrings it from them to place it flat between her fragile clavicles, pressing it to her skin with the fat end of a finger.

 

He wonders what his fingers would look like slick from her to the knuckle while he watches the fine striping of sweat prick out around her hairline and admires the tan line across her pale breasts where her collar has sunk low.

 

He’s up on his elbows and knees, his palms against the fan of her hair and she’s staring at his face, every part of her trying to curl up tight and hide but gone so still to avoid spooking the larger predator in the room.

 

Her knees pull so tightly together he hears the damp slide of the skin while she’s holding them together and twisting to the side. She’s guards herself from the maleness of his body more than the foreign danger of how he’s not really a man at all.

 

The hiss startles her and the nudge of the snake between her ankles turns her body to stone, it moves over the floor and up the line of her clenched together legs, rooting under the fall of her skirt, looking for a warm burrow it knows is close, close enough to scent in its mouth.

 

Her eyes have gone wide below him and he knows without seeing anything but the shape of her mouth when the snake’s found its way to the soft mound she’s sequestered from boys and men.

 

She shifts, inching away across the floor as much as she might, but she’s only looking at his face. Her exhale of relief burns to life down his spine like a trigger pin, the snake that’s a part of him curls up above her dress, over her hips and away from them, moving to curl in the rectangle of sun dragged wide from the window all the way to the opposite wall.

 

He’s burning in the sun, half-lit and half-hidden.

 

“Gotta save the sinners too, Katie,” he mutters.

 

He rises, shoulders moving like some king cobra from its woven basket, head hanging on a limp neck, looking down at her from under his brow. She keeps herself flattened to the floorboards, too afraid to move.

 

That’s what’s going to get her killed one day. His shadow falls over her and she’s trembling.

 

He lets her slide back, away from him and twist over, scrambling on all fours away until she’s risen up on her own feet and swaying against the doorframe.

 

The stick of his gel has come loose, a stiff lock of hair falls across his forehead. He smiles at her and closes his eyes.

 

When he opens them again she’s gone.

 

* * *

 

 

She’s rolled out of bed to carefully cross the floorboards on tiptoes and slow steps, his brother’s come and she can hear them speaking in quiet tones in the open room off the short dusty hallway.

 

“You need to take her for a couple of days to Yucatan. To that safehouse you have.” She hears Richie tells his brother who only scoffs and then left in silence, interrupts it.

 

“You don’t give back a gift, Richard.”

 

“I can’t be around her right now.”

 

Her fingers rub the rough wood of the door, it creaks but there’s no sudden jolt of quiet from the room down the hall to betray that they’ve heard her, she holds her breath.

 

“What? She piss you off? Try to manhandle you? What’s she weigh buck twenty?” His brother’s laugh is something made of dark rum and gunmetal.

 

She remembers the laugh from the marketplace restaurant, it’s not real laughter.

 

“She’s gonna start bleeding and I’m still not myself.”

 

She wonders how he knows about her period, wonders if he’s read it in her expressions, she’s been worried about it, wondering how best to ask for menstrual products and hoping she’d be let go before needing to worry about it.

 

“I’m surprised you’re holding out,” his brother says, jocular, with amusement in his tone.

 

It’s grating and she hates hearing it.

 

“If she’s not your type I’ll find you something different. But, it’s kind of hard, though. English speaking virgins in the middle of fucking Mexico. Just thought you wanted something different than snake-bitch.”

 

She can hear Seth blow out a sound and then his footsteps creaking around in the hall when his brother doesn't answer him. “Whatever,” Seth says.

 

And, quieter, from his brother; “I like her.  If she stays I’m going to tear her apart by tomorrow. I don’t want to do that.”

 

Her heart beats faster, fear and admiration, she can convince herself still that her heart jumps at the chance she might have to escape, to run, to make it out of Mexico alive and unbrutalized.

 

“Fine,” Seth says.  “But I’m not doing this again a month from now. Screw your balls on.”

 

“Be. Nice,” Richie presses.

 

“I. said. Oh. Kay.”

 

She backs up from the door as footsteps move closer to it but no one opens the door and no one speaks to her through it. It’s like she isn’t even there.

 

* * *

 

 

She wakes up to a dark shadow on the wall she’s turned herself to face, she startles at the voice.

 

“Get up. We’re leaving.”

 

And he’s already shoving clothes into a garbage bag and she’s complacent, thoughtful about whether he’s going to kill her and that’s why he’s bagging up every item she might have worn or touched.

 

He reaches for the hotel bible on the nightstand and she grabs it first, clutches it in her two hands like it’s the one her mother gave her for her sixteenth birthday.

 

“Where are we going?” she asks him, quite sternly, she thinks.

 

He takes out his gun and holds it, not pointing it, but still enough of a warning despite how very casual it’s all come to seem. “We’re going out to the car. May I escort you there?” he asks her.

 

“It’s just for a little while, Kate,” Richie tells her, standing in the doorframe like some nighttime spectre though it’s day and he looks softer in the eyes than his brother does.

 

The tears well and she can’t help it.

 

Richie grows morose, Seth more irritated, he huffs and then he sighs, gun under his crossed arms as he leans closer to her level.

 

“Listen, Kid. I’m not going to bury you in the desert because you haven’t been a good girl and I’m not going to be the first to arrive to whatever horrific gangbang scenario you’re scared is gonna happen. Can we go now?”

 

She sniffs.

 

“What are you two?” she asks, more bite in the question than she’s intended, more than she knows is safe to express.

 

Seth points at her bible, “Won’t find the answer in there, princess,” he says, black garbage bag held on his shoulder, incongruous. He looks like the type of man who would carry a briefcase full of money from a bank.

 

Richie blinks yellow at her but she doesn’t startle at that anymore.  

 

“You know what I am,” he says.

 

A shake feels like it’s starting in her limbs, but she breathes. “Okay,” she says, cowed.

 

And her voice is steady.

 

* * *

 

 

“I thought we were going to Yucatan,” she says out loud beside him.

 

“He wants you to be safe from him. It’d be dumb if I went where he thinks I’m going,” Seth tells her, sunglasses in place and checking behind them with the rearview, tracking the placement of all the men with guns through it and along the sides.

 

“If you say anything you shouldn’t say I’ll have to kill all of these guys. They have families and kids and dogs,” he says, not looking at her.

 

“I won’t say anything,” she promises, meaning it.

 

He looks at her then and through his sunglasses his eyes glow a darker yellow-red than his brother’s might. There’s something different about this brother too, there’s something wrong with him.

 

 “I didn’t say ‘don’t talk,’ I said ‘don’t say anything you shouldn’t say.’”

 

“I’m your sister,” she tries, hoping she won’t need a better backstory than.

 

“Yeah,” he says, thoughtfully. He looks away. “I guess you will be soon,” he mutters to himself.

 

* * *

 

 

He’s smiling  at her sideways, a sudden dumb grin that makes him look crazed.

 

“What?” she asks before she can stop herself, hoping he’s not about to pull off into the desert to start digging her shallow grave among the cacti and the rodent holes.

 

“Just thinking about when you tried to sell me religion over french fries.”

 

“I wasn’t trying to sell you anything,” she says, slipping down further against the leather of the seat, hating to remember the instance they met in, hating her own self for her foolishness and her trust.

 

“Don’t lie. You were. Like they pass out those promise rings and act like it’s normal. Because a bicurious Jesus needs an adolescent harem.”

 

She sighs roughly and twist to look at him again, brave for a moment. “Why did you take me?”

 

He scoffs. “Come on, kid.”

 

“No. I want to know. Don’t I deserve that, at least?” The anger is gone, something sadder and more coring left behind to empty her out. “My parents probably blew their savings to look for me, my brother is probably blaming himself because he wasn’t there that day, my dad will think I’m alive but my mom will think I’m dead, you’ve ruined my family. So don’t keep lying to me.”

 

He does pull off the road then, turns the car off and twists in his seat to face her, the leather creaks around his shoulders.

 

“You believe in god, so start believing in what else there is around because that’s why you’re here. My brother went to Hell to get me once. And, maybe I’m being selfish but I want him around, so I brought him up here to stay until he gets mad and storms off like he always does or I do and leave him somewhere and tell myself it’s because he’s always been better alone. He needs you, he needs the whole sacrificial bit, every bit of you. So, I’m a bastard, I ain’t got no problem with that. But, your life was never great to begin with. Now, you’re here, my brother likes you or he would have done you already and come out of his dark little shanty house like he’s always does, leaving a mess behind him that’s made of blood and cum.”

 

“I’m not scared of you,” she tells him even as she’s leaning away from him.

 

“Yeah, you should be scared of my brother. He used to cut out their eyes first, _before_ he took what was his from them, before he ate their hearts.”

 

She looks away, out onto the desert where nothing is moving and wonders how far she could run.

 

“Silent treatment now?” he asks twisting closer.

 

She can smell his aftershave.

 

“Let me tell you something about where you would have been in a year if I didn’t find you with your bible and your hope. Your mother would have overdosed on what she takes for ‘headaches’, really it’s just valium, and the ambien she takes because she can’t sleep, but you knew that because you went through her medicine cabinet one day. Your brother, who none of you call by his real name, would have been on the news for something that’s become purely statistical for maladjusted, outcasted, headcase boys. Your father would still be around, alcoholic stupor and shame and he’d rot for days before they find him two decades from now. He’d be alone because you’d leave. You’d start to drink too, learn what those family genes really do. You’d get fucked by boys and men you don’t marry or love and call it comfort and you’d get fat and sad and eventually you’d get out, find your faith again, get married, get fatter, have mediocre children and die just as lonely and sad and wrung out as you would be a year from now if I hadn’t put you in the trunk taken you away from, All. That. Shit.”

 

“You’re not my god,” she tells him.

 

He barks out a laugh and starts the car, shifting smoothly into second, feet on the clutch and the gas.

 

* * *

 

 

For three days her make-shift pads are stained brown with a thick discharge that looks like it belongs to a dead body.

 

It's the stress she says when she’s asked if she's done yet and tells him no.

 

He offers her some expired midol and more scratchy napkins, cracks a joke about aunt flo and leaves her alone again before she can ask for pantyliners.

 

In the beginning there had been darkness.

 

They drove all night and then at last they stopped and he stuffed her in a clay room with no windows.

 

The room is made up of a mattress and a large CRV television on the floor next to a pile of deliberately placed VHS tapes that she continues to ignore. She spends all her time in the adjoining bathroom, in the porcelain tub sleeping.

 

She drinks but barely eats, worries that her blood will come in once she’s been brought back to his brother. Instead the consistency changes, until it’s an almost black liquid spilling out of her like water from a leaky faucet, it’s old blood, leftover from her previous cycle. Maybe her body has nothing new to give.

 

Hardly tempting to a creature of the night.

 

She hopes.

 

She prays because she can feel herself falling into some kind of grief that comes before.

 

She’s brought back and left alone again with the brother who she’s been stolen for in the first place, the other gone in a cloud of gravel dirt and curses about how his brother needs to stop pussy footing around.

 

Three hours into her _homecoming_ he brings her a steak and tells her she needs the iron.

 

She pushes it around the plate once she’s cut it into pieces. “You’re anemic,” he tells her very sagely from behind his glasses.

 

“How do you know th-...” His smile is more smirk and she flushes, not about to finish asking how he knows.

 

* * *

 

 

“What did my brother say to you?” he asks, long stare lingering.

 

“Nothing,” she lies. “He just told me...things.”

 

Things that linger like his stare.

 

“I’m sorry. He does that.”

 

“Are you hungry?”

 

“I’m fine.”

 

“You need to eat,” he insists.

 

She presses her mouth to where she’s pulled the skirt of her dress tight over her knees, the fabric dampening slowly from the humidity of her breath, she puts her tongue there and the cotton is rough. She’s hungry.

 

“Are _you_ hungry?” She asks, wondering if he’ll lie to her.

 

“Don’t ask unless you want to feed me.”

 

She raises her eyes, they hurt from being open so long, she’s been awake for almost a whole day and she hasn’t been sleeping well besides.  “Do you need to be fed? Like a dog. Or, a cat?” Her tone is lazy and waspish, it’s too hot and it’s making her weak.

 

She hasn’t come out of _her_ room in days.

 

She’s been a mystery disappearance for far longer, months it feels like, or even a year, she wonders sometimes, trying not to forget that she’s being looked for and that she isn’t dead yet.

 

“You’re cute when you’re mean.” He tells her, sitting down on the floor against the wall, getting dust on his coal black suit, it’s the one that’s narrower at the waist than his usual, he doesn’t look so Bible salesmen in it.

 

He looks like a funeral director who’s trying to sell her her own coffin.

 

“I want to go home.”

 

She lets her body fold onto its side, the bed is comfortable, she feels like she could sleep for the first time in forever.

 

Maybe it’s the talking, maybe it’s him, being alone for such long periods of time makes her too anxious to sleep. She feels like the last person left alive in the world. Like, somehow, she missed the Rapture, or Armageddon.

 

“I did too, for a while.”

 

Her eyes shift, the pillow blocks some of his face from her sideways view of where he’s still sitting.

 

“What?”

 

“My brother called, raised me up and now I’m here. He was lonely. I was fine by myself. Humans can be solitary if they want to be, Kate.”

 

“I still want to go home.”

 

“I know. But you can’t.”

 

She nods and rolls over to the other side so she won’t have to look at him, and so he can’t watch her cry. He really does sound sorry about it.

 

* * *

 

 

He smiles quietly to himself, at her walking beside him, docile and controlled.

 

“I missed you.” He admits, amused with himself, hands in his pockets. He’s too quick then, coming down to her level with his mouth open and warm.

 

His tongue tastes like bitterness and blood.

 

She’s surprised but not as much when he comes back for second pull on her soul.  

 

His hands fit around her biceps and he noses under her ear, down the tendon of her neck and she shivers.

 

His chuckle is low and dirty on her nape as he moves past, letting go of her body, walking on, moving slowly so she can catch up, she stumbles after him.

 

She’s looks around them then as he looks back at her, like he knows that she’s looking for places to run.

 

* * *

 

 

She eats because it’s clear they aren’t going to let her go and she’s hungry.

 

She’s still afraid but it’s a softer kind of fear now, he’s tender with her but there’s plentiful violence in him for others, the man he calls Professor recieves the brunt of it.

 

Blood sprays across her face when Richie moves, faster than anything should be able to move, when he puts a fist to the man it pops out from the sternum, ribs broken, heart beating and blood spitting from the space between.

 

Richie’s face is still a man’s face when he does it.

 

Tanner got close, touched her hair, eyes flashing yellow and a hand creeping towards her knee.

 

The professor groans like a child told to go clean their room, lamenting how long it will take for him to heal before he goes into shock, flopping gracelessly forward, onto her. He isn’t dead but he won’t be awake for a while.

 

Richie grins down at her face, fallen in shock and bloodied by his easy rage.

 

He takes a breath, deep and resonant, exhales with lips barely parted, grounding himself and straightening his tie, he smooths back where his hair has become disheveled, blood smeared over his brow and the shine of his hair.

 

His eyes turn down to her, where she is still sitting, frozen.

 

There’s blood on her cheeks in a fine mist, but drops roll down her collar, in her lap is a puddle, a slick deluge between where her thighs were already balmy with sweat from the day’s heat.

 

He holds out a hand.

 

“Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

 

He smiles at her and it’s boyish and kind.

 

She gapes, staring quickly down at her lap and the dead man slanted across it, her hands raised as flat palms by her ears.

 

Richie waits, grin tipping down into a smile.

 

She lets her hands come down softly, like he’s an animal who will strike if she moves too suddenly, she doesn’t look but can feel the still gruesome warmth of the Professor’s scalp under his hair when she pushes at it.

 

The body doesn’t budge, she pushes harder at his head and a shoulder and shoves him towards the floor.

 

She raises red palms and stares down at where he’s tumbled with a crack and a slap of flesh. A hand folds into hers and she looks up, letting herself be pulled to stand.

 

She follows.

 

He’s only a little more than half a head taller than she is when he sits down next to the tub. “You’re a mess.”

 

She swallows, undresses down to her mismatched underwear, he looks off from her until she’s finished; bra off her arms and panties kicked from her ankles. She’s awkward in her tan lines and embarrassed by her dirty nails and untidy pubic hair.

 

He looks at her, the colors of her like a patchwork quilt of red and pale and freckled and brown. She’s never been naked in front of anyone before and it’s heady. His eyes are yellow and she’s taken two steps toward him before she’s realized an urge to move closer.

 

He’s tender again, asking if the water is too hot when he’s turned the shower on. She steps in and he slides the foggy glass closed on her, her body dissolving into some blurred shape.  He stays to wrap her in a towel, arms folding around her and she wonders if he’s hard, doesn’t know how she’d be able to tell, he’s the first man she’s been so close to.

 

There’s an ache in her chest when he moves to leave and she follows like she always does, her steps are slow in the hall.

 

He stops with steam falling over their shadows in the lighted rectangle of the doorway on the floor in front of them.

 

He’s quick like when he kills, pressing up close and she’s on her toes in an instant, neck craning to slot her mouth with his.

 

It feels good.

 

Something out of everything feels _good_.

 

His tongue in her mouth is suffocating and metallic again and that’s good too, and he is hard, and his fingers pulling her towel down is a white flag of surrender on her part.

 

He doesn’t fuck her but he touches her with his hands and she reaches out for his belt loops but comes up short. He’d hefted her up, balanced on his wide thigh, carried to her own little bed and her orgasm is electricity and chills.

 

His eyes are yellow, looking down at her face and she messes his hair under her palms.

 

“That doesn’t look like Bible study,” the professor interrupting.

 

Richie gaze somewhere over her head, irritated, short tempered.

 

“We’re late,” The Professor says again, unfazed by his own near death.

 

She lies on the bed once he’s gone and drifts in the haze and the heat and her own disbelief.

 

* * *

 

 

The lawman doesn’t sleep, beside him, driving easily, stoic in his Stetson is another like him, a man he respects, a man he admires, a man with a last mission like another man’s last gasp.

 

“There’s a little girl somewhere, Frederico, and she’s scared and she doesn’t deserve what ends are coming to her. You know what that means?”

 

And he does.

 

“Drive faster,” the law man tells the old man and his Stetson.

 

* * *

 

 

They hunch over maps on a card table, making a plan, marking the boundaries of their shared territory, the man they call Professor comes sometimes, a woman with hair like midnight and nails like talons whose mouth is always a bloody colored pout looks sad when she finds her hiding spot, down a step from the main on a couch trying to read something in a book half academic, half ancient myth.

 

Kate doesn’t want pity, only some constancy in place of rescue because rescue is untenable to even think of anymore.

 

The woman looks up at Richie and he looks back, expressionless.

 

* * *

 

 

When she wakes up there’s the bright technicolor red of her period all over her legs and the sheets beneath her. There’s him sitting on the edge of desk pushed up against the wall, tossing a paperweight between his palms, and looking the picture of patience.

 

Her runaway  heart has him looking up.

 

“Good morning,” he says.

 

And, ‘ _oh god’_ , she thinks, so many nameless things of what happens now move behind her eyes.

 

“I know you’re a mess under there,” he says, very plainly, conversationally, killer cool.

 

Her guts writhe like snakes.

 

“I want to clean you up.”

 

She shivers and _h_ er body feels hot, inside she clenches, just once, a kiss of a shallow flutter inside of her, something slips out warmly, she breathes like she’s going to be chased.

 

“I fed before, so I wouldn’t be hungry.” He seems to try to smile, fails, a twisted half grin settles on the soft line of his lips.

 

“This can be for fun,” he offers, trying again, smile punctuated by his eyes, by his sharper teeth.

 

“What?”

 

He smiles and unfolds himself, sits again at the foot of the bed, pulling the sheet down in a slow drag with one hand, fingers folding and unfolding on a fist, her ankle in the snare of his hand, body yanked down to the foot of the bed as she turns into bent knees and a lost breath.

 

He’s big between her thighs with all ten fingers curled around the band of her panties, red and ruined, he’s smiling and she wonders what’s going to be left of her.

 

If she ever doubted that he was something other than a man before she doesn’t now while his cool eyes survey her skinny legs, he’s perfectly calm, but his eyelids have gone heavy and his head has dropped forward, it’s like he isn’t real.

 

A man so close to her, unthinkable and unimaginable, she thinks of safe things, youth group, Kyle’s smiles, her bedcovers at home, and he’s unreal.

 

He folds down to rub his cheek along her calf.

 

Shaving her legs now seems  like an invitation. Maybe it was, she can no longer tell with everything so wrapped up together in some other version of life and the entire world she thought was all there was.

 

His heavy head is between her knees, licking at their undersides with little hesitation and no reticence, his hands hold the tops of her thighs, collar them and smears red in an aimless pattern of tongue guided mess along the inside of her thighs, it stirs the chaos in him.

 

She kicks and he startles, mouth painted in lurid shades of disarray.

 

“I don’t want to have fun with you,” she gasps, halfway to a cry because she’s warmer now, liking his mouth, his fingers leaving marks under her thighs.

 

He slinks back from her, shoulders first, head a-sway.

 

“You should clean up, then.”

 

She can’t move until he gestures, then she goes, rolling from the bed, damp in the way only blood’s dampness lingers with a soft grip between her legs, cotton sticking to the underside of her ass, the elastic uncomfortable as she pulls her panties back up.

 

The shower stall is cramped, clean but unlit, an unreplaced bulb in its ceiling light, red runs around her toes, somewhere else a door open and shuts.

 

* * *

 

 

The old towel chafes and smells musty, it rubs the skin around her ribs pink.

 

He’s hanging half off the bed, long legs bent, slacks open, mouth sucking on the sheets she’s ruined, with hand working over himself.

His eyes are lambent yellow and his face is full of scales.

 

She twists back into the bathroom and locks the door like it might do any sort of good against him.

 

He’s gone for the next four days and when he returns they linger a few days more in place, walking around each other.

 

She’s seen something baser in him that she can’t unremember and he knows what she tastes like now.

 

* * *

 

 

“Do you like the beach?”

 

“I’ve never been to the beach at night.”

 

“Never?”

 

“No.”

 

He sits in the sand and his moon made shadow stretches long across the sand. Her own sits next to his.

 

The waves sound like the world’s secret heart and he tells her the stories he remembers, real things he’s seen beyond the world’s heartbeat she knows by familiar seasons and sunrises that were once much stranger.

 

Something changes.

 

It’s not between them, it’s in her.

 

* * *

 

 

He’s brought her somewhere.

Back home, the only person she’s ever thought to classify as some kind of best friend was Jessica. It seems odd to think of her now.  The sleepovers and how she had a pack of tarot cards and jarred lavender, the post-sleepover ritual of decoding their mishmash of meaningless brain junk into some kind of psychic life truth with a battered old book from the library thrift shelf.

 

It’s odd to think of home now.

 

Serpents and snakes are distinct from each other in dreams, she remembers, blearily, like she’s only just woken from sleep now.

 

Snakes are primordial urges, the instinctive self, a snake leaving the mouth of  corpse is meant to represent the sexual act itself. There’s death and there’s fear and she isn’t dreaming now.

 

She’s afraid, ashamed, excited by shame, too many things at once that are altogether different and in the dark there are eyes watching her legs are open.

 

What’s under her back has started to shift.

 

* * *

 

 

Under hospital fluorescents and chemical sedation she’s smaller than she’s ever been. Freckles make her look even younger, malnutrition has made her haggard, brutality has left its bruises.

 

Her dirty hair across the pillow is some martyr’s halo and Freddie can’t look at it for too long without wanting to weep.

 

She’s just only a kid, like his kid, like anyone’s.

 

The IV chimes, there’s blood on the corner of her sheets.

 

His cell phone chimes, it’s time to leave.

 

He tries not to look back into the room once he’s left it.

 

* * *

 

 

Heaven is a red thing, a warm place, like blood or swimming and the man in her room at night speaks in tongues, squeezing through the gaps in the walls, hissing all the way through.

 

* * *

 

 

They’ve brushed her hair and washed her with efficient hands and deceptively soft disposable wash cloths.

 

It’s her eighth day in a room whose lights never turn off, curtained away in a solitary bed.

 

Her lips are no longer dry but the deep fissure crack in the fullness of the bottom one is stitched with a bead of blood, it aches sharply like she does around where he’d bit her breast and fit himself inside of her.

 

The dreams are better than the bright room and the sour antiseptic smell, the sunwashed pattern of the privacy curtain with its crown of yellowing mesh.

 

The IV has run dry and she pretends to sleep when a nurse finally, _finally_ , answers it’s blaring chimes, a spectacular ache behind her temples that can’t be cured by rehydration throbs.

 

At night the nurses sleep at their station, the lights dim but never go out and Kate dreams unsettling things again.

 

The bite itches, her sex still swollen and the inside of her mouth feels hot.

 

She remembers what it felt like and uses the harsh stitch of the pillowcase stamped with a hospital name to wipe her cheeks.

 

He made her love him and led her by the hand like some trusting lamb, the favorite to the altar and no god had stopped his knife because he was the god.

 

 _“You did so well, now I can stay. You were praying to me. I could feel it.”_ He’d said, smiling against her ear, taking what was left to take.

 

He’d told her that he needed something from her.

 

* * *

 

 

The desert was dark, but the stars were like pinpricks into heaven and she’d still thought, somehow, that harm would not find her.

 

But, he wasn’t a man, or a monster, he was just something else’s god, some monster’s man-shaped god made of bible black leather and the crisp sharp edges of obsidian like the core of some dark star fallen onto and into the earth.

 

He’s in the dark and it’s his hands, hands that can open doors and vaults, his lock pick fingers all over her skin.

 

She’s sticky skinned, pressed down into the earth, in a grave she wonders if he dug for her, some pit in the ground, a hole she’s crawled into (and she had crawled she thinks, her knees are raw and her palms sore).

 

The hiss had risen like the gas in an old stove.

 

Her body rolling, she’s not asleep and the thing in her mouth had hissed against her lips.

 

They’re parts of him, she knows, wonders, inside of her, as resonant as growing pains or a toothache.

 

She does ache, something blooming close to bursting, the things inside of her move so deep there isn’t any more room.

 

She thinks about liking it, that she’s allowed to now, some choice to enjoy it when she doesn’t have a say in it, he’s inside of her like a pile of snakes, like a man, all at once. He’s not a god she knows but she’s praying all the same it seems.

 

Her tongue knows the taste of scales and coils like hands pressed around her thighs and hips and knees to make them heavier, to leave them falling open.

 

The writhing between her legs is warm and sentient, a tangle of the sinuous that pushes its way slickly inside, followed by another, and another greedy for the sacrifice she’s become, fucking her, slowly.

 

His constancy in it was as present as a god’s, she knows what he is, knew what he was with his cock inside of her.

 

* * *

 

 

And they’d found her in the desert, like a sacrifice, left for birds to pick at her flesh and mice to nest in her hair and flies to find the warm space of her open belly where he’s put a knife.

 

Except, they’d found her early, or maybe, she thinks, some god has use of her yet.

 

It’s hopeful, and it’s hope she thinks wryly, that’s the only thing she hasn’t lost or had taken or given up more freely than she’s been told good Christian girls should.

 

* * *

 

 

And, if before dawn when someone will arrive to bring her home she traces the soreness between her legs and sighs, knowing what gods feel like when they fuck you, then there’s no one around to hear her press her open mouth against the bed that smells like bleach and sickness, and exhale with a prayer tucked behind her teeth in the shape of his name as her fingers slide inside to try and match the stretch of him.

 

* * *

 

 

“You did so well,” he says.

 

She shakes, not about to stop the tremor in her limbs, between her legs.

 

“I feel better,” he tells her as she’s splayed in the dirt and dust.

 

His trickster fingers on the hottest parts of her sore body make her turn her head away, twist her hips and gasp.

 

“I’m sorry,” he says sounding like he means it.

 

The knife is black like his suit and his tie and his shoes and the sky.

 

* * *

 

 

And the blood had even tasted red, in her mouth, poured in it, poured on her wounds, painted onto her skin by different hands.

 

And a different man who has his own reasons to hate tricky gods raises her back up using the soul of someone else to stitch her back together.

 

“Hey, Katie. Don’t worry about a thing.”

 

The professor had grinned and spoke new words and didn’t even touch her, helped something else settle inside of her, beside her soul.

 

She figures she should be thankful for what’s kept her alive, even if it scares her when it speaks up during the night when the nurses have left the room.

 

* * *

 

 

She wakes up with some other thing’s name and some other thing’s wants but there’s something that connects them, something that’s the same, rage or hate or the awful wanting that stretches her bones.

 

The walk is not so far, the man who’s made her a woman is lingering in her absence, the god who’s devoured her doesn’t know what he’s been waiting for and it’s all the same to her.

 

Man or God, she can stomach a meal of both.

 

Kate Fuller is just a girl who disappeared once.

 

She does it a second time on her own, it’s just as easy.

 

**Author's Note:**

> might do a sequel


End file.
